Der gebrochene Leib Christi

Reverend Cho’s pneumatology accents a theology of divine presence that anticipates in present experience the fulfillment of creation in the presence of God. The divine presence in Cho’s pneumatology causes all things to be transformed in the image of Christ. Through this accent on God’s transformative presence, Cho contributes his own unique voice to the larger Pentecostal tendency to focus attention on life in the presence of the Spirit. Pentecostal theology has traditionally emphasized the yielding of creation to the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Cho’s theology of presence has the distinct advantage of being multidimensional or holistic rather than dualistic, since his pneumatological vision rejects the idea that body and soul are separate and inherently in conflict. Rather, for Cho, each dimension of human life (body, mind, spirit) involves and fulfills the other in the presence of the Spirit. Within this integral life in the Spirit, Cho highlights the responsibilities of envisioning or speaking in ways that are faithful to the Spirit, and he encourages those who do this to expect blessings or prosperity as a result in all dimensions of life. Yet, he does not deny that suffering may also have to be endured in order to serve a higher, spiritual purpose. The overall goal of the Spirit’s presence is the conformity of the creation to Christ’s image to the ultimate glory of God.

Since the inception of the field of disability theology, questions have been raised about the place of disabilities in the resurrection. Some scholars contend that disability is a direct consequence of the fall of humanity and thus consider disability as incongruous with life in a perfect and redeemed creation. Other scholars, however, see disability as part of the natural diversity of humanity and allow for the retention of at least some disabilities in the future kingdom. In his 2019 volume Woundrously Wounded, Brian Brock attempts to redirect discussions about disability to the present kingdom encouraging believers to consider anew the place of people with disabilities in church communities. Brock proposes that using Paul’s Body of Christ imagery serves as a useful model for church communities with its emphasis on valuing, including, and celebrating all members. The challenge of the Body of Christ is to recognize that all members are dependent and interconnected and that human abilities and disabilities do not hinder God’s work in and through the Body to bring about his purposes. This paper will give a brief overview of both the elimination and retention models of disability as well as outlining Brock’s challenge to refocus attention on the Body of Christ as the inclusive model for living for churches in the today.

Leviticus is often considered to be one of the most challenging books of the Bible because of its focus on blood sacrifice, infectious diseases, and complicated dietary restrictions. Moreover, scholarly approaches have focused primarily on divisions in the text without considering its overarching theological message. In this volume, Mark W. Scarlata analyses Leviticus' theology, establishing the connection between God's divine presence and Israel's life. Exploring the symbols and rituals of ancient Israel, he traces how Leviticus develops a theology of holiness in space and time, one that weaves together the homes of the Israelites with the home of God. Seen through this theological lens, Leviticus' text demonstrates how to live in the fullness of God's holy presence and in harmony with one another and the land. Its theological vision also offers insights into how we might live today in a re-sacralized world that cherishes human dignity and cares for creation.

This article describes that the perfection of God’s creation was guaranteed by faith, must be hold and lived in the life of the believers. Physical weakness (difable) is not a condition cause decreasing the perfection of God’s creation. Difable is not decreasing or weakening the existence and essence of human being as the body of Christ which was loved and saved by the blood of Christ. This article used the library research in theology, explored the love of God in the life of human being. The result showed that the church must develop the ministries of educating and empowering disable people (people with the special need). They are perfect as the body of Christ because the God itself is perfect. God is perfect so the creation is perfect too. Human being was perfected by the love of God.

Attending to the material orientation of the spiritualizing and ascetic culture of late ancient Christianity, this essay explores the phenomenon of the "ambiguous corporeality" of saintly bodies as they were represented in hagiography and in the cult of relics. Central to the religious sensibility that was both promoted and elicited by these representations were convictions that everyday human life was saturated with divine presence, and that the human body could be a locus of sanctity. Hagiographic texts employed sensory realism, especially in terms of sight and touch, in order to articulate how the holy could be present in the world in a nonidolatrous way. Both ephemeral and tangible at once, saintly bodies provided a site for the negotiation of central theological concerns, with the implications of the doctrine of the incarnation being among the most significant.

The disabled body of Christ has a critical potential as a metaphor in our time. It reveals the frailty of the body and speaks of the presence of God in our world. As a metaphor for the human body, it serves as an effective contrast to the idealized and commercialized images of the body. It provides an alternative image of communal life for social bodies, a transformable context that is given to us, not created or controlled by us. In addition, it gives us a vision of God's future as already present in human life. The body of Christ is a relevant metaphor for christological, ecclesiological and anthropological reflection. It is important to examine the actual appearance of the metaphorical referent, that is the body of Jesus. If we define it as a disabled and bruised body, the metaphorical potential is increased, and the connection between the three theological areas may appear more clearly.

Into the debates about Christ's two natures, divine and human, and how they relate, Martin Luther threw his extended interpretation of the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of the person Christ's attributes. Luther's Christology is incarnational and it is fundamental to him that God can and will be known only as a human being (homo/Mensch), yet Christ's real presence is presented three dimensionally and in bodily intersectionality. Luther's complex understanding of Christ as really human and the Word incarnate is reflected in his intense work with the sacraments as well as with semantics and the art of translation. Luther aims at an inclusive Christology, sacramentology, and language. Hence Christ is human, not male; sacraments are seen as direct exchange between God and humans in the body of Christ; and ministry is reconfigured as a human function of preaching the Word (ministerium verbi), not a substitute representing divine sacredness.

This article exams the implecations of Luther's theology of the cross for living with disability as well as living as the body of Christ, the church. Existing work on the theologia crucis will contribute to the formation of an inclusive theology of disability. Luther's theology of the cross, also reffered to as the red tread of Lutheran tradition, offers a faithful resource for understanding and accepting disability. The theology of the cross and its interplay with law and Gospel will be examined. This exploration will lead to adiscussion of Christian vocation - how to live as a theologian of the cross. Finally, a theology of disabilty that challenges Christians to live as theologians of the cross, free to embrace and serve all members of the body of Christ, will be suggested.

This article reconceives Christian freedom as dependence. It diagnoses how modern Protestant semantics, despite relational rhetoric, tend to default to the autonomous subject. It retrieves Luther's paradox ‘lord of all/servant of all’ and reads Bonhoeffer's freedom as responsibility and vicarious representative action in his Ethics as a test case: a Christologically framed ethic that, because it requires judgment and decision, remains vulnerable to subject-centred recoding. Disability theology functions as a hermeneutical correction, relocating freedom within vulnerability, shared agency, and enabling relations. Dogmatically, in the unio hypostatica and communicatio idiomatum , the crucified-and-risen Christ's enduring wounds disclose divine freedom as shared self-commitment. Returning to Bonhoeffer, the article unfolds the imago Dei within an ‘ontology of the Name’, proposing a Christologically grounded, relational anthropology. It finally asks whether the difficulty of thinking beyond autonomy reflects a tacit split between anthropology and soteriology, and explores how a Christological reorientation might reconfigure the field.

The world has changed so much. The changing of the world has affected all dimensions of human life. It has brought about a change in the role of religious institutions. Moreover, people from different cultures, religions, denominations, and spiritualities come together and share the same land, air, and social life. However, the Good News still has to be spread and shared. Diane M. Millis, the founder of Journey Conversation Project, believes that conversation involves verbal and non-verbal messages. She senses another dimension in human conversation, which is Divine Presence. In this sense, daily encounters can be a means of spiritual conversation. This research will apply qualitative research. The target population of this research is Catholic lay people who are involved in the New Evangelisation movement and pastoral ministry. The findings are as follows: First, creating or capturing a ‘generative theme’. It is important in conversation to reach a generative theme. Second, engaging with people’s lives. This step includes questioning, listening, and responding. Third, sharing Christian faith, the experience of faith. This is a crucial moment in which evangelizers must discern whether or not they will convert the conversation into sharing or providing the interlocutor with knowledge of belief or Christian values. Fourth, giving an authentic affirmation. Fifth, praying. The evangelizers can invite those with whom they have conversations to pray.

The world has changed so much. The changing of the world has affected all dimensions of human life. It has brought about a change in the role of religious institutions. Moreover, people from different cultures, religions, denominations, and spiritualities come together and share the same land, air, and social life. However, the Good News still has to be spread and shared. Diane M. Millis, the founder of Journey Conversation Project, believes that conversation involves verbal and non-verbal messages. She senses another dimension in human conversation, which is Divine Presence. In this sense, daily encounters can be a means of spiritual conversation. This research will apply qualitative research. The target population of this research is Catholic lay people who are involved in the New Evangelisation movement and pastoral ministry. The findings are as follows: First, creating or capturing a ‘generative theme’. It is important in conversation to reach a generative theme. Second, engaging with people’s lives. This step includes questioning, listening, and responding. Third, sharing Christian faith, the experience of faith. This is a crucial moment in which evangelizers must discern whether or not they will convert the conversation into sharing or providing the interlocutor with knowledge of belief or Christian values. Fourth, giving an authentic affirmation. Fifth, praying. The evangelizers can invite those with whom they have conversations to pray.

This book is a disciplined introduction to ecclesiology. With respect to the community which “the Lord purchased with his own blood (Acts 20:28), parts one and two focus on a critical-exegetical presentation of the New Testament’s descriptions and themes, locating their treatment within two millennia of reflection, and appreciating the impact of those contexts on our understanding. From over ninety New Testament images, chapters four to ten identify and argue for three foundational concepts: ekklēsia (assembly); sōma Christou (the body of Christ); and koinōnia hagiōn (the communion of the saints). Continuing the conversation with Scripture and its history of interpretation, Robert Doyle then applies the determinative biblical themes to present practice, centering it on the churches of the Evangelical and Reformed traditions. Part four illuminates ecclesiology from other foundational Christian doctrines: the triune God of holy love; Christology, our ascended human high priest and king; and the doctrine of revelation, the church as “the pillar and bulwark of the truth.” The final part focuses on three possible points of transformation in ecclesial life and witness, both internally and outward to the world.

This book is a disciplined introduction to ecclesiology. With respect to the community which “the Lord purchased with his own blood (Acts 20:28), parts one and two focus on a critical-exegetical presentation of the New Testament’s descriptions and themes, locating their treatment within two millennia of reflection, and appreciating the impact of those contexts on our understanding. From over ninety New Testament images, chapters four to ten identify and argue for three foundational concepts: ekklesia (assembly); soma Christou (the body of Christ); and koinonia hagion (the communion of the saints). Continuing the conversation with Scripture and its history of interpretation, Robert Doyle then applies the determinative biblical themes to present practice, centering it on the churches of the Evangelical and Reformed traditions. Part four illuminates ecclesiology from other foundational Christian doctrines: the triune God of holy love; Christology, our ascended human high priest and king; and the doctrine of revelation, the church as “the pillar and bulwark of the truth.” The final part focuses on three possible points of transformation in ecclesial life and witness, both internally and outward to the world.

Summary Wondrously Wounded sets out to reconfigure our theological idea of what disability is. It moves away, not only from charity or medical models, but also from some current thinking in disability theology (that those labelled disabled reveal humanity’s true vulnerability) to a starting point of all life being a gift, so all capable of mediating God’s goodness. Brock grounds his argument in patristic ideas of a radical Christian human solidarity, and a convincing exegesis of 1 Corinthians 12, the body of Christ and spiritual gifts. The whole is brought to life by an account of Brock’s son, Adam, who is labelled disabled, but who under this analysis is perhaps the healthiest of us all. This is an important next step in the development of a convincing Christian theology of disability.

The article examines the question of the theological origins of the philosophy named after A. F. Losev. The analysis shows that the notions of name as energy and name as cosmos are related to Losev's turning to the Old Testament and early Christian terminological traditions of using the concept of "Name" to convey the idea of the divine presence. As a result of accepting the Greek philosophical terminology on the part of the Christian Church, the idea of the divine presence in the created world began to be conveyed through the term of divine energy. A.F. Losev believes that the identification of the name and the signified thing is a sign of pre-philosophical mythological thinking in general. It gives a clue to the mentioned Old Testament tradition of the name divinity. Philosophical secular thinking fundamentally departs from such a religious worldview element. For this reason, philosophical and archaic worldviews can be seen in the two mentioned customs, which have been reflected in the theological terminology. The theological perception of the philosophical categorical system has not resulted in the complete displacement of "name" from the Christian theological discourse. The ancient Bible tradition of conveying the idea of the divine presence in the categories of "name" and "glory" is evident in a number of the holy fathers' works (St. Justin the Philosopher, St. John Chrysostom, St. Isaac of Nineveh). "Name" as a term close to the that of "energy" is more peculiar to Liturgical texts as A.F. Losev sees it. Losev's idea of God's name as the ontological energetic foundation of the cosmos, usually seen as a borrowing from Neoplatonism, goes back, among other things, to the doctrine of the church as the Body of Christ.